Being intrigued by which real stars some of those in the Elite: Dangerous beta were based on I decided to find a catalogue of real stars and their positions and find out. What I eventually found and ended up using was the HYG 2.0 database from The Astronomy Nexus: The HYG Database.
I fleshed this out into having x,y,z co-ordinates in the correct galactic system (using a transformation matrix found in this paper with axes swapped where needed to match what Elite: Dangerous uses. You can download the resulting CSV file if you wish. Note that the co-ordinates don't exactly match ED's, which I can only assume is due to Frontier Developments having added some combination of precession and proper motion for the ~1300 year passage of time for when the game is set (in 3300AD).
Now I have made this page which will allow you to enter approximate Elite: Dangerous co-ordinates and find out what real stars are close to them.
NB: I won't quite have all the Elite: Dangerous stars in my database, I know I'm missing all the WISE-only data for instance.
There are two styles of search, as evidenced by the two 'Search' buttons below.
'Range' is how close stars must be to the given co-ordinates in order to be displayed in the results.
# | Distance | HIP | HD | HR | Gliese | Bayer Flamsteed | Proper Name | Spectrum | ED x | ED y | ED z |
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